Here's the deal. On one hand you are in high school and you are learning. And it's wonderfully educational to be making up the show as you go. I believe every technician should start out running cues manually on a two scene preset because you have to be so much more focused and in tune with the show. However on the other hand you have the goal of doing real professional theater. Let's think about how they do lighting. They hire a pro designer to come in and design lights for a show they hang hundreds of lights and write a couple hundred cues for a show. It's all very subtle and yet it supports the plot and guides the audience through the show in so many ways. That man/penman isn't paid to run the lights he/she is paid to create... someone else get's paid a lot less money to run them. But the trick is they want to make EVERY performance look the way the designer intended. If you can't record cues how do you create the same thing every night?
So why should you record cues? Well first off it opens up the opportunity to do REAL lighting design. You can set all kinds of fades and timings that will really alter the way the audience reacts to a show and these are things you just can't consistently do every night manually. Secondly it's learning to do it the way you will do it in college and in the pro world. Third you are right it's sort of boring to push a button but the flip side is it's a great way to plug your new students into a show. They don't have to know a lot to be able to run lights. When I was teaching high school my best technician was programing the light board with my newest technician sitting at their side and running the show later. It does get boring, but it's also a great way to get a feel for how to program and a fabulous place to put the new person.
Just wait until you get into a theater situation running sound effects on a computer. Then you need to find two button pushing monkeys for each show.
